Burn County · internal tool
The A&R scout
Your scouting pass, running as software. Name an artist and it does the part you do by hand: reads who owns their records, checks whether the numbers reconcile, and says which of your three deals fits — before you spend a call on it.
“I’ll say country, unsigned, Spotify followers less than 10K… I’m looking for people who are moving the needle, but who are not signed yet.”
Nothing run yet. Every figure below comes from Deezer, Apple Music and MusicBrainz — three public catalogues, no account, no subscription — and every one is shown with the source it came from.
How it decides
The rights line
Every release carries a ℗ credit naming whoever owns it. The scout reads that line and sorts it into a major, an independent label, or the artist themselves — the same inference you made out loud from a TuneCore credit on the call. A major is disqualifying: there is nobody to sign.
Plays against audience
“28 million streams and 3,000 followers. That doesn’t make sense.” The scout runs that test against Deezer, which an artist inflating a Spotify profile has no reason to have touched. When the two do not move together it flags it rather than scoring it.
One song or a catalogue
When most of an artist’s measured popularity sits on a single track, that is a playlist add or an ad spend, not an audience that follows them to the next record.
What it refuses to guess
Their budget. You already gave the only reliable method for that one — “I ask them” — so the scout ranks who is worth asking and stops there.